PCB Quality accreditations and systems in place at FCA

At First Choice Assembly obviously quality is at the forefront of all of our printed circuit board manufacturing and assembly processes.

As you would expect we hold BS EN ISO9001:2000 accreditation. This means we have a quality management system which covers everything from the time the order is placed for your PCBs to the despatch of the PCB assembly.

More than this at First Choice Assembly we need to ensure that the printed circuit boards we supply are of the quality you would expect. This is done in the first place by understanding our client's requirements but then ensuring that we work with the client to ensure the correct level of test and inspection is carried out on their PCB assembly.

Wherever possible we carry out a level of electrical test either full functional test or part test whichever the client requires. This can be done using client supplied equipment or we can design test equipment around the test specification given to us by our client.

If we cannot electrically test a printed circuit board due to build level or complexity of the test required in addition to the normal visual inspection checks we carry out through the assembly process. We have a Supervision AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection) machine made by DCB Automation. Using a 2mega pixel camera the Supervision scans the printed circuit board and stores the image. The XY coordinates from the pick and place machine are also used in conjunction with the image to inspect each component on the PCB for its value, solder integrity and position/ orientation. The Supervision holds each component in a library to be used on other PCBs once programmed so set up is very easy. Each printed circuit board we inspect with the Supervision is held on its hard drive and can be recalled the next time a batch of the PCB assembly is made. As Supervision is not a comparator style AOI the operator does not need a known “good” PCB before inspection can be carried out. Once a PCB is stored on Supervision it can be recalled for first off inspection on the next batch of PCBs ensuring correct batch assembly is achieved. For more information on Supervision please visit www.dcbautomation.com.